Overview: Digital Transformation

Here are some considerations if you are thinking of building a conversational product or weaponizing an existing product for the bot age.

Key takeaways from this post include knowing what’s needed to understand user activity, and seeing some pipeline architectures that support this analysis.

Salesforce’s Peter Coffee offers a singular analysis of the meaning of singularity and its key consequences.

Slack, already an indispensable tool within newsrooms, is becoming a surprisingly effective community tool for publishers as well... quickly become a source of stories, with members providing inspiration or even direct contributions.

How can project management help news outlets improve their workflow and manage their time and resources better?... the role of a product manager or developer will sometimes overlap with that of a project manager, Katharine Bailey, the outlet's head of news products, told Journalism.co.uk in a recent podcast.

the Post is employing a concept called “laddering,” converting unique visitors into paying customers by getting them to increase social engagement with its website.

We asked  respondents to share the different types of challenges they face... changing company culture lead with 63% of respondents stating that it is an extremely significant to successfully lead digital transformation efforts toward fruition... executive support is key to sanctioning change and investing in it

You’re losing valuable growth opportunities and have extreme difficulty building and effectively marketing ..., it could be the result of organizational silos sabotaging your brand and business strategy... what’s the better alternative? The collective insights and experiences of the 50 CMOs in the study resulted in two headlines.

While Slack is basically a chat room for your business (with private messaging functionality), Groups also lets users share common calendars, OneDrive-hosted files, and OneNote notebooks... With Groups threaded messages, however, anyone with access can dive in at any time and read back over all the entries without being distracted by other items i…

Every business, at some point, faces competition. But competition is not the same as disruptive competition — a new class of competitors created when technology enables new players to compete with incumbents on terms the incumbent isn’t used to... it’s all the digital forces that have faced the newspaper business — from blogs to aggregators to soc…

minor changes at the surface level do nothing to affect the fundamental operations of a company. Appointing a Chief Digital Officer, with no budget and no clear mandate, is not digital transformation. Increasing the social media marketing budget is not digital transformation... have a different approach to everything. Real digital transformation …

Jobs instructed the architect to design physical space that encouraged staff to get out of their offices and mingle, particularly with those with whom they normally wouldn’t interact. Jobs believed that serendipitous exchanges fueled innovation... The more diverse a person’s social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative... we use…

the most valuable tools make it easier for employees to collaborate—and could even transform the way organizations work... We asked executives about their companies’ use of social tools, digital technologies, and big data... using social begets better use of these other technologies. When organizations digitize a process’s work flow ... using soc…

developers should not only be included in design and usability work from the beginning, they should also meet the people who eventually use their product... Developers need to be more vocal about the need to be included at these early stages... Excluding the developer from the design process will do nothing but prevent the project from living up t…

Imagine that we have heard the sentence “The dog chases the cat” several times, but we haven’t ever heard the sentence “The cat chases the mouse”. As soon as we hear it, we infer that cats do some things similarly to dogs: at least they also chase. But we know even more: we also know that “cat” have the same syntactic behaviour in the latter sente…

The Turing Test is supposed to determine whether a machine can think, or seem to think. How would you test whether a machine can process and simulate feelings so well that a human user could develop real feelings for it? Well, how do you test whether you could love anyone?You flirt.... The goals of flirting... resemble the goals of contemporary …

The solution is in a new method of policy making with strong similarities to the agile approach ... “Policy making will be service design, and the designing of services will be the making of policy. Ideas and their implementation will be so close together... The way the law is made will have to change.

After so much talking about the risks of ultraintelligent machines, it is time to turn on the light, stop worrying about sci-fi scenarios, and start focusing on AI’s actual challenges, in order to avoid making painful and costly mistakes in the design and use of our smart technologies... Believers in true AI and in Good’s ‘intelligence explosion’…

Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, sets out how this technology could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity... The report makes a number of recommendations which focus on ministerial leadership, research, standards and the need for proof of concept trials.

Blockchain... - is already being explored as a way of securely managing the distribution of government grants... a key role in the Government as a Platform programme to create "an ecosystem of interconnected components that departmental teams can use to assemble their services ... foster a new culture of trust”.

AI can be effective, particularly its Natural Language Processing (NLP) aspect — but only in the right context... we need to work out when it’s a help and when it’s a hindrance... Whilst AI may be the new kid on the technological block, it works best as a complement to good UI, not a substitute.

The feed is dying, and we feel shocked by its death — but we shouldn’t... imagine a library organized chronologically, or even the morning edition of a newspaper... the curated feed ... can, theoretically, eliminate posting anxiety, find the people you want to talk to (and the people you want to hear from) and make the experience of posting feel …

Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.... Enter your quest…

Facebook introduced new APIs for messaging through Facebook Messenger. ... bots are legitimately cool and promise to revolutionize how we interact with services. And it’s a piece of cake to get one up and running.

I haven’t yet met a single bot that actually does ANYTHING better than a great UX... that actually does ANYTHING beyond a narrow scripted interaction. They all seem OK inside a script (in English), but become super-annoying very fast, when moving out of their pre-designed limits. So I decided to deploy a chatbot, without building one, just to see …

When a Vox Media Slack user sends a direct message to simbot specifying a seed article URL and a number of desired results, then the bot would return a ranked list of articles that are most similar in content to the article found in the provided URL. two main applications for the bot ... enable editors ... on social media... to discover related…

You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services... The trouble is that computers still have a hard time understanding human language... but chatbots are still prone to confusion and misunderstanding... The best commercial chatbots will most likely be those that recognize their own limitations... There have been no …

Picture a nightmarish future in which half-witted “conversational user interfaces” drive us insane with mindless conversation and misunderstandings...chatbots may be incredibly annoying. And things may be even more annoying if app designers fail to appreciate the significant challenges that remain with using computers to parse and respond to natur…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

this addiction has been killing my sanity and sapping our productivity as we simply used Slack for too many things... we would add more channels in a desperate attempt to allow people to find the important information they needed while avoiding the noise... All of these interactions would happen in Slack, despite there being many other tools tha…